Alternate funding of UBI

posted by Lila Redden | 25pt
August 01, 2017

I've heard you discuss UBI in the past and one of your major concerns with it as a concept is wage earner resentment. I was thinking on another subject recently and inadvertently came up with a funding model which would potentially resolve this problem and wanted to know what you thought of the concept and its viability.

The model is premised on major actions and everything else seems to logically flow from these.

1. Do away with minimum wage but set an executive pay cap of 100 times average worker pay.

2. The creation of "community interest" shares within companies which make up a fixed proportion of shares, if new shares are offered or created a proportional number must be allocated for community interest. All municipalities a business operates receive an equal portion of these shares which are used to fund a Universal Basic Income.

My thoughts are that this mechanisms would improve worker wages due to the first change and provide the economic groundwork necessary to establish cooperatives with the second. Attempts by businesses to manipulate governments to improve their profits simply feed back into the UBI and it encourages citizens to focus their purchasing and business activity into local and regional businesses who will tend to divide their community interest pool amongst fewer municipalities. This tendency would encourage shareholder flight from larger national/multi-national companies toward smaller regional ones and likewise cooperatives. I'd love to hear what you think

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Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at UMass Amherst and a visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. Richard Wolff is also a co-founder and active contributor of his non-profit: Democracy at Work